With rapidly growing of user's needs for accessing digital contents everywhere, various communication technologies have been developed for transmission of the digital contents. These communication technologies may be developed for different environments, different transmission speeds and/or different user requirements. In addition, several medium access control (MAC) protocols are established based on different communication standards, which define different communication methods based on heterogeneous mediums. For example, IEEE 1901 communication standard is used for power line (PLC), IEEE 802.11 communication standard is used for wireless communication (i.e. WiFi), IEEE 802.3 communication standard is used for Ethernet, and Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) communication standard is used for coaxial cables, and so on.
As a result, a MAC abstraction sub-layer is developed for convergence of these various media. Please refer to FIG. 1, which is a schematic diagram of an exemplary communication device 10 in a data plane. The communication device 10 may be a mobile phone, laptop, tablet computer, electronic book, modem, or portable computer system, and uses various media for communication. In FIG. 1, the MAC abstraction sub-layer is arranged between an upper layer and a plurality of MAC types of a MAC layer each corresponding to a medium specification (i.e. PLC, WiFi, MoCA, or Ethernet). The upper layer can be a network layer, a transport layer, an application layer or any layer responsible for processing the signalings and the packets received from the MAC abstraction sub-layer, and signalings and packets to be transmitted via the MAC abstraction sub-layer.
In addition, the MAC abstraction sub-layer shall be able to provide a unified MAC configuration experience to users. That is, a user does not separately configure the MAC parameters for the various MAC types (e.g. PLC, WiFi, MoCA, or Ethernet) of the underlying MAC layer, to conform with the MAC parameter settings (i.e. format, length, type, etc.) of the MAC types of the MAC layer. However, there is no guideline for a unified MAC parameter mapping to a specific MAC type parameter. Without clear mapping method, the MAC abstraction sub-layer may use the unified MAC parameter to configure the underlying MAC layer, which may not conform to a parameter setting of a MAC type of the underlying MAC layer, and thereby causing improper configuration and/or system error.